Thank you, Sharan Burrow,
and all your colleagues, for the invitation to address you t oday.

Your Conference could not come at a more important
time for the political debate over education as we head towards an election
the Prime Minister seems to want to call earlier rather than later.

It would be a great mistake if we allowed the election
pitch to override the things that we are discussing at this Conference.

Because, of the thousand ways to measure the way
the conservative parties in this country have withered to become what
they are today - tired, small-minded and irrelevant - the clearest is
this government's attitude to education.

Here you have a Party holding office on the threshold
of a new century, with great new challenges and opportunities for Australia.
Here you have a Party allegedly dedicated to the idea of individual
empowerment and achievement. A Party, therefore, with responsibilities,
and with pretensions, but when it comes to education, it shows itself
to be a government that has declared itself incapable of governing Australia
for the 21st Century.

Australia is, and we must remain, a decent civilised
democracy. We are, and we must remain a skilled and successful economy.
Whether or not we meet these great twin objectives will depend centrally
on the quality of our education system. It will be determined by whether
or not the system will be open to all Australians, whatever their status,
wherever they live.

And, as we know, and our political opponents should,
none of this is possible without the rational, responsible and consistent
support of government.

And on the threshold of the election that will take
us into the 21st century, we have an education system that is being
stripped of its capacity to help us make the best of what the 21st Century
will bring.

An education system being dragged backwards just
as it should be surging forwards.

But let's not just assert that, It won't do just
to assert it We must explain it, we must argue it, and we must do so
tirelessly, and we must do so from first principles.

So let's go to the first principles,

Consider our situation today.

We are moving into the new century as a small market
in a world in which the big market counts. We depend in large measure
on selling commodities whose prices are highly variable on world markets.
We are a small national economy in a world in which the new economic
forces leap over national boundaries.

The forces of economic globalisation are changing
everything. They have moved against nations relying heavily on exporting
minerals and farm products, and in favour of those producing sophisticated
goods and services. They have moved against economies depending on machine
power, and in favour of those harnessing brain power. They have moved
in favour of people with high skills, and against people with low or
no skills.

Just in the last few days, a report by CEDA has made
clear what is at stake here. It points out that the Asian economies
won't have their current problems for ever; that they will re-emerge
and grow quickly again, thanks in large part to their high levels of
investment in technology, and the skills of their workers. It confirms
that we will be competitive with these economies only if education policy
focuses on developing human capital. The future will depend more on
the accumulation of human capital than on the accumulation of physical
capital and the exploitation of natural resources. As the report says:

“Australia should seek to be a 'clever nation'
with high average levels of human capital relative to its trading partners."

In the Australian Labor Party, we intend to put ourselves
at the forefront of the debate as to how Australia achieves this. Let
me give you some introduction to our thinking today.

I want to start by coupling for you today two quotations
taken from my colleague Mark Latham's book Civilising Global Capital
which I think summarise how Australia must be thinking about education
policy as we approach the 21st Century.

"History tells us that
whenever society has faced widespread insecurity and rapid economic
change, lasting answers have only ever been found in the logic of collective
action."

“The most effective form
of collective action in an open economy and society now lies in ensuring that each of a nation's citizens
can respond adeptly to the contingencies of change. This means using
the learning processes to empower people to act in new ways - to develop
skills and personal capacity, so that change can be treated more as
an opportunity than a threat."

These quotations I think encapsulate Labor's view
of education as a strategic resource for the future of our nation, and
our determination that government must play a strong role in the national
investment in education.

There is a debate here we must win, because there
are two trends in education policy, each of them leading in contradictory
directions.

The first is to view education as essentially a source
of private benefit to an individual, in the form of better jobs, greater
participation in society, and higher pay, to name a few. The logic is
that the individual should make the majority of the financial contribution
towards the education which produces these advantages. It is the line
of argument preferred by our political opponents.

The other trend emerges from the increasing body
of analysis of strategies for national competitiveness, In this age
of globalisation, such analysis points towards education as an important
resource for nations and their competitiveness in today's world, and
therefore as a good for which there is a compelling logic for public
provision.

The thing those of us in political office must ask
ourselves is this: will a reliance on private provision, and private
sources of funding for education, result in an appropriate level of
investment in education for our future as a nation?

I think not, and I think that for a very particular
reason. It is a simple law of economics that private investment in education
will need to be weighed according to the extent of expected private
benefit in education. On balance, private investment will not have in
mind the public benefits which flow from education. There is therefore
an argument, as far as the overall stock of national investment in education
is concern, that exclusively privately-funded investment in education
would result in a nation underinvesting in education.

Thankfully, exclusively private sources of investment
in education are not in prospect for Australia's education system at
this stage of the debate - only ever in Dr Kemp's quieter reflective
moments when he casts free the shackles and cares of everyday life and
his imagination is allowed to wander.

But there is a balance to be preserved between public
and private education, and we might well wonder if that balance as it
stands at present is appropriate.

There can be absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind
that an education system exclusively, or even significantly, based on
private sources of investment, will not provide educational opportunity
equally to all our citizens.

There is, of course, no reason to believe that those
citizens with the greatest aptitude for learning will always be those
citizens with the greatest means available to them to pay for that learning.

It is this question of the national stock of investment
in education, and the distributional aspects of investment in education
that makes the argument for a clear ideology of commitment to public
education,

And I choose the word ideology deliberately.

I choose it because education is not simply a matter
of social justice and equity, but it is. Nor is it simply a matter of
security. It is that too.

It is fundamentally a matter of national development
and survival. If education is not argued as a public good, and if that
essential ideological commitment is not there in the minds of decision-makers,
then the capacity of Australians to confront a rapidly changing world
is seriously damaged.

I have said before, and I will say again, that when
it comes to concepts as important as this, we politicians must carry
some ideology around with us - not of the left, nor of the right, but
an ideology steeped in what we must all realise is an absolute imperative
for our country's future prosperity.

We must understand that, when
it comes to national competitiveness, there are some options simply
unavailable to us. It is simple and self-evident that, in most industries,
you could cut Australian workers' wages in half and they would still
be more expen sive than workers elsewhere in the world. It has
long been true for Australia that in so many industries we cannot compete
internationally on the basis of the price of our labour.

The only solution for Australia resides in embracing
the dignity and intelligence of our workforce, I have an audience before
me - and I am proud to say I have a Party behind me - that understands
these things: that understands educated workers are more productive
workers. That understands more productive workers justify higher wages.
And that understands more productive workers make for a more competitive
product on international markets.

This is just further proof, if any of us needed it,
of the intellectual bankruptcy of this government's approach to education.

It represents the agenda of a government that just
wants the 21st Century to wait a few more years, and to come when -
and if - it is ready to deal with the challenges.

Even this characterisation is charitable, because
what the Howard government has been doing is to undermine our greatest
source of competitiveness.

Everybody here will have their
reasons for being painfully aware of the consequences.

The effect of this year's
Budget is that total spending on all education will fall by 6% between
1996-97 and 2001-02. Sp ending on schools will fall 1.3%, though enrolments
are expected to be about 70,000 higher in 2000 than in 1996.

Nominal funding for government schools this financial
year will be $1.289 billion. Discounted for price increases, this works
out at $1.193 billion - or nearly $90 million below the level for last
financial year.

Thanks to the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment, government
schools are set lose up to $270 million over the next four years. This
year alone, they will lose about $12 million, even though they are enrolling
8,500 more students than last year.

No matter where we stand in the debate over public
and private education, it's impossible to deny that this government's
Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment is wrong in principle, and a mistake
in practice. We totally reject the idea that growth in one area of education
should be at the expense of another, and accordingly we oppose their
EBA, and we will abolish it when we win office.

The Government has been advised by its own officials
that schools will need about $140 million so that they can cope with
the 27,000 16 and 17 year olds who will be forced back to school by
the introduction of the Common Youth Allowance. The 1998 Budget provides
$42 million. Schools in the Liverpool-Fairfield area are anticipating
that they will be looking after well over 700 extra Year 10s and 11s
next year; up on the central Coast, nearly 600.

In the closing years of last century, the Labor Party
was born to give the workers who built this nation a political voice.
That continues to be our job today.

A century ago, the workers who were building this
nation were building its physical infrastructure - the ports, the roads,
the railways, the buildings, the mines and the factories. They were
building the capital which gave us strong Australian industries, secure
Australian jobs and a prosperous society this century - our first century
as a nation.

Next century, the capital Australia must build will
increasingly be different. Increasingly, the builders will be the educators
in society: the teachers, the lecturers, the child care workers and
the parents of Australia.

And Labor must be there, and Labor will be there,
to give you a voice, but also to support you and invest in you, because
you will be building the future for our people and our nation.

So let me start with a subject close to my heart:
Teacher Professional Development.

When we were in Government we had planned to add
more than $60 million over three years to the three year National Professional
Development Program that I began in 1993. The emphasis was to be on
information technology. Of the $300 million we had earmarked for our
EdNA program, fully 20% was to go into professional development.

The Coalition also promised
to add another three years to the NPDP, though with only $45 million
taken from somewhere else in the DEET portfolio, This turned out to
be yet another non-core promise.

I've often pointed out that
teachers tend to be forgotte n as an element in the education debate. Yet they
have the first and often the most influential role in the cultural and
ethical development of our children.

Our view is that any good government should contribute
in material and other ways to the quality and development of teaching
as a profession. Good government should be concentrating on ways to
use teachers' experience and skills as we develop the quality and accessibility
and relevance of our education system.

Why then does the Howard Government and some of its
followers at the State Government level see them as the enemy?

A Class Act , the recent Senate committee report on the condition
of teaching, had some very discouraging things to say about this. It
reported that teachers were depressed at the lack of support they were
getting, the demand from all sides that they do more with less, and
the ill-informed criticism aimed at them.

It may be true that teachers can earn reasonable
entry salaries. But the Senate committee found that the average teacher
earned less than $50,000 a year and that she or he can reach the highest
level of salary after nine years.

Today, in other words, a great many teachers will
have gone as high up the salary chain as they're ever likely to get
something like five or six years ago.

After more than two years of steady strangulation
of resources and abuse from the likes of Dr Kemp, it's small wonder
that the Senate committee decided that teacher morale had just about
reached rock bottom,

If education determines whether or not we can compete
in and survive the new century as a skilled, informed and free community,
how can we treat its workers like this?

Well, Labor won't. Teacher Professional Development
will be one of the highest priorities we intend to address in our education
policies for the next election.

And in that spirit, let me conclude today with some
of the broad outlines of where Labor intends to go in Education policy.

Let me start with something
which is obvious to everyone here. We all know - not just the hist ory teachers - that Rome was not built in a day,
though Nero burnt it in one.

When we assume office we will have a big job to do
and a lot to repair, not just in education, but across the full gamut
of government services.

We take this job seriously, and for what it is and
must be: a long-term program of reconstruction, steadily building and
consolidating and guaranteeing good government for the future.

So let me tell you what we will do.

We will recognise that the Coalition has placed under
attack every philosophical underpinning of the skilling of our Australian
population put in place since the 1970s.

* They have attacked the notion
of education as a public good.

* They have attacked Labor's
legacy of broadening the base of access to tertiary educati on as a means of enhancing the national skill base
and guaranteeing social justice.

* They have attacked the system Labor created to remove
sectarianism from Australian secondary education.

* They have attacked the self-evident notion that
dealing with unemployment means dealing with skills deficits and the
programmes Labor had in place to address these deficits.

* And they have attacked, by starving the child care
system of funds, the quality of child care, and thereby invariably much
of the educational content of that child care.

We cannot pretend all this
has been only a minor drift. In so many areas, we need to re-build from
first principles again.

Everything Labor did for education
in the 1980s and 1990s fed off the great Education Inquiries - the Kar mel and Kangan reports.

This is where we must start again - start to fix
the damage, but also to try and catch up the yards the conservatives
have lost us in the meantime - to create an education system truly based
on continuous and repeated investment and reinvestment in our nation's
human capital - in short, to give reality to the idea of lifelong learning.

This I why I have committed
Labor to a ground-up review of the entire Australian educatlon system
- pre-schools, primary and secondary schools, VET and Universities.

I do not intend this to be
a simple exercise, or an inquiry for the sake of it. It will be a full-blown National Commission. The task is
too big, and the timeframe too short, to allow for any further drift.
We must review the entire structure of Australian education.

Governments have set up essential inquiries into
education in the past, and I mention again Karmel and Kangan, and the
others we all know so well, but they have all been sector specific.
There has never been a close and total look at the whole structure,
its links and connections and its relevance to our being - and remaining
- a skilled economy as well as a civilised democracy.

I suggested such an Inquiry to Mr Howard more than
two years ago and offered him my full support. It didn't happen then.
It will happen when we win office.

The Inquiry will, of course, be advisory in terms
of telling us what is needed to create the education system we aspire
to, but I also want it to have a continuing role in terms of delivering
on its plans. It may, like Gough Whitlam's Schools Commission, go over
into actual implementation of some of its recommendations.

We, as a government, and also you, as a union, will
have ideas and priorities to feed into the inquiry, and in that context
I would like to give you some of the priorities we will want to assert.

We have already said that we will abolish the EBA,
and abolish it we will.

We have also foreshadowed our intention, through
programs of professional development, to do what any enlightened employer
would do: and that is to invest in adding value to the skills of education
workers.

Our Platform shows that we're determined to put in
place a system of allocating funding for schools which will basically
do two things. It will seek to take out the divide between the public
and private streams and base funding on need. And it will seek to end
the cost-shifting between the Commonwealth and the States that makes
such a contribution to that divide.

We believe, as the Platform says, that:

"scarce public resources must focus on core
concerns about socioeconomic needs and capability rather than on false
economies of absolute choice.... that the only fair and effective way
to frame schools policy is to invest fully in Australian schools, whether
government or non-government, and to allocate these funds on the basis
of need".

Labors approach will be to
rat ionalise the dual funding streams and allocate funding
on the basis of acceptable national principles and standards. These
will include acceptance of federal responsibilities in resourcing schools
in disadvantaged neighbourhoods; sensible planning in development of
non-government schools so that they do not disadvantage existing schools,
either public or private.

Let me close by saying that I am pleased to see the
ideas you discuss at this Conference argued with passion and conviction
and commitment.

But we have passed the point in our history as a
nation when the idea of education as a public good - the idea of national
investment in education can remain within this Conference.

We must re-double our efforts to get them on the
canvas of national politics. Other nations are already there.

This government will resist our efforts. It will
want to talk about other things its favoured diversions mostly - but
we must not let it.

Because a government that does not want to talk about
education, a government that has nothing to say about it, is not a government
worth the candle.